


Holly Berries

by TheReviewGuest



Series: Ghosts of Kamino [1]
Category: Halo (Video Games) & Related Fandoms, Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Child Soldiers, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Jedi as Found Family (Star Wars), Mandalorian Culture (Star Wars), Military Science Fiction, Parental Shaak Ti, SPARTAN-III
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-15 18:14:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29193624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheReviewGuest/pseuds/TheReviewGuest
Summary: Holly-G003 was a soldier- pure, and uncomplicated. So were the Clones, funnily enough. What a world.
Relationships: Colt/Shaak Ti, Holly-G003 & Echo, Holly-G003 & Fives, Holly-G003 & Kelly-087, Shaak Ti & Holly-G003
Series: Ghosts of Kamino [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2143353
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	Holly Berries

**Author's Note:**

> New Story! Meant to work on something else but this bugged me... Whoops.
> 
> No Beta, open to one though.

Chapter 1

The Girl From Onyx

A LOTUS anti-tank mine detonated- the air around it pulsing outward in a clear wave, just before the explosive itself cracked with a thunderous report that would have blinded any normal man. It did little but make Holly G-003’s insides flutter as the polarized visor of her Semi-Powered Infiltration armor did its job, preventing the blinding light from burning her retinas. She leaned slightly from foot to foot, her fellow Spartan IIIs doing the same nearby. _Been off the smoothers an hour too long._ She thought briefly, before quashing the line of thinking.

Focus. She needed to focus. The Spartan IIs- the predecessors of her own generation of super soldiers- were the image of calm. They _were the same_ , she thought. _Just like Ash, Olivia and Mark._ She glanced at Kelly 087, in her green armor and EVA helmet and LOTUS detonator in hand. She must have noticed Holly looking- though how she could through the SPI Helmet’s domed visor, she had no clue- and with her left hand, drew a finger across her visor in a downwards curve. A Spartan Smile, Holly knew, and she couldn’t help but smile slightly herself.

In that brief moment, she turned her attention back to the explosion. The smoke had finally dissipated enough to see the ruined bodies of Elites and grunts peppered across the slope of the Forerunner structure, and beyond that, two staggered Hunters- behemoths made up of eel like colonies of Mgalekgolo- lowered shields coming back to bear.

To the Spartans, the spaces between seconds seemed to be lifetimes. Their enhanced reflexes allowed them to perceive time slower than normal for brief periods, and it was why the group of Spartans were able to chuck grenades and crack off shots with their SRS 99 rifles before the Hunters could recover.

One of them went down with a grenade to the torso- but the other writhed in shared pain and anger. They were bonded pairs- made from a single colony. It was able to get its shield back up, and duck down to protect itself. Distracted by this, Holly barely noticed the other pair of Hunters flank her and Kelly- along with more Elites. Kelly was fast. She engaged the first Elite, killing it by breaking its energy sword wielding wrist and cutting it in half after an elbow to its ugly, squid-like face. But Holly barely noticed that, further away and closing on Kelly’s position. The hunters had raised their fuel rod cannons.

Those brutal cannons had the power to melt straight through Scorpion Main Battle Tanks with ease- Kelly was going to die.

 _No,_ Holly set her jaw, sabatons thudding against the ground as she thundered towards Kelly at speeds no Olympian could hope to match. Kelly had barely turned towards the Hunters, having finished the Elite. Holly saw the glow of the cannons, the report of the magnetic firing system launching the incendiary gel from its tubes.

 _Kelly is going to make it,_ She decided. _I won’t_.

She finally made it to Kelly and passed her. She met the gel in the middle- and burned.

Her SPI armor turned molten in an instant, and she felt her skin alight with the exploding fuel.

 _I’m sorry._ She thought bitterly. _Mark, Ash, Holly, Will. Team Katana, Sabre, Lucy and Tom. Lieutenant Ambrose- Kurt._ He had told her to call him Kurt, because he was one of them. Holly wouldn’t have been able to cry if she wanted to, due to the intense heat. _One of them._ All Spartans, all Family. Kelly, Fred, Linda. Dante. _Oh God, Dante_.

Spartan Time faded, and so did she.

* * *

_Interesting_. Thought the monitor. It was not a full Monitor, like the ancillas and guardians of the Halo installations, but a monitor. The Shield World was its priority, its only concern however, and it paid little to the other Forerunner installations. What occupied its attention now was a burst of energy near the portal that led into the Micro-Dyson Sphere, the world that was meant to be Haven from the cleansing of the Rings. The monitor tutted, examining the reading further.

 _Reclaimer,_ it realized. _It’s a reclaimer!_

Concern flooded its pathways, however, as it picked up the detonation of an incendiary substance, radiation spilling across the area. The Reclaimer had been incinerated by the primitives! It shuddered in disappointment. _How barbaric!_

 _Oh._ The monitor suddenly became very impressed with itself.

The energy readings of the burning Reclaimer were very similar to that of the wavelengths that the Forerunner portals operated on. All the monitor had to do to preserve the Reclaimer was to modulate the radioactive energy to match that of the slip-gates. Very intelligent! The monitor praised itself! Violently, however, concern flooded back into its neural net.

The Ark was preparing to fire. The monitor couldn’t send the Reclaimer into the shield world due to protocol- the main portal was the only way in or out- lower risk of infected entry or compromising the sphere to Halo’s burning energy discharge. The monitor couldn’t override the frequency of the main portal either because the reclaimer was already in Slipspace.

The Dyson Sphere was in Slipspace as well, so it needed a receiving dais that could bring her back into real-space. Obviously, nothing withing the realm of the Forerunners was an option because of the imminently firing Halo Installations, and the monitor gave the equivalent of a digital sigh. It was almost resigned to allow the reclaimer to fade into Slipspace and out of existence, before another thought occurred to it.

It pulled up the Domain- a Forerunner network that spanned the entire galaxy and connected all of its installations in an impenetrable data stream- and searched through the list of installations.

_Where is it, where is it…_

It found its target installation- a single extra-galactic outpost in a galaxy far outside the Forerunner Mantle Galaxy- and quickly fired the Slipspace pulse that would return the Reclaimer to real-space.

 _Marvelous!_ It thought. _I am a genius._

And with that, the Reclaimer left its priority queue, permanently.

* * *

Holly panicked.

One moment, she’d been on fire and burning, burning to death and the next…

She was freezing. Her SPI armor was warped, but somehow the pressure seal had been kept intact on her under-suit.

Which was a _damn_ good thing because looking out the window of yet another Forerunner structure, she realized that she was under water!

She took lengths to control her breathing, but control hadn’t always been Holly’s strong suit. She’d previously been demoted- twice- for getting into fights over people teasing her because of her hair. She _liked_ her hair, the shaved bear claw look had been one of the only ways to maintain some individuality in a military where regulation length hair was required. So when she tried to control her breathing, it didn’t go as well as she’d hoped.

 _Think, Holly, think._ She was trapped underwater. Her pressurized SPI armor should be able to take the crushing depth, but after tanking that Hunter blast? She’d no idea if it would hold. The depth meter that appeared on her VISR HUD read 3,000 meters below sea level, and that shouldn’t be too bad. The Ocean floor on earth was around 3,000 meters, and the Marianas trench was about 11,000. That didn’t mean that she wouldn’t get the bends something fierce, however.

She looked around the structure that she’d appeared in, hoping to find some device or console that she could access to send her back, but she didn’t se anything of note. The room was surprisingly barren, but most of the Forerunner structures on Onyx had been that way too… She groaned in annoyance. Mendez was going to kill her.

* * *

Jedi General Shaak Ti was not unfamiliar with attachment.

Togruta were pack hunters, social creatures. Their bonds with their fellows ran strong and deep. It was ingrained within them to connect with others and spend the rest of their lives caring for them. The urge to protect and the urge to pick a life-mate were very, very strong.

Shaak Ti- being a Jedi- was forbidden from forming attachments. Those within the Jedi Order lived their lives for others, to protect and nourish all life in the galaxy, and to beat back the darkness that would take the galaxy by force. They followed the will of the Force, and in turn it guided them.

Shaak never considered the urge to mate and rear children to be overly intoxicating while she had been a padawan underneath Asem Del’Ashari, or even in the 60 odd years following that. But after the outbreak of the Clone Wars…

She had been one of the first Jedi to fight alongside the Clones, and something that she had realized about the elite soldiers during that brutal first battle of Geonosis, was that they were impossibly young. The oldest soldier on Geonosis was ten years old. Some of those soldiers, the Null Arcs, had been cryogenically frozen before being shipped back to Kamino or Coruscant to be brought down from the heat of battle by their trainers because they had been too volatile for the newly minted Jedi Generals to control. Shaak wished she could have been there to help them, but she’d gone to Kamino to observe the development process of the Republic’s new army. She’d found so many ethical issues with the Kaminoan cloning process that she could barely begin to list them.

It wasn’t a pleasant first year of the war, and she’d spent all of the time she could there ever since.

It was within the third month that she’d seen her first batch of cadets ship out. She’d seen cadets ship out yes, but these she’d mentally classed as _hers_. Possessiveness begot attachment, but it was hard to care when she’d been raising these children for Force’s sake.

She knew them all by name, number, and face. Each one was beautifully unique, their experiences vastly different from each other, but the Kaminoans didn’t see it that way. They were… tools. _Slaves_. If Shaak spent more time dwelling on that thought line she’d vomit.

But the senate would never discharge the GAR, not this early in the war. Even the Navy was mainly clones, competent in the extreme at whatever task they were assigned. They were fast learners, disciplined, intelligent. Brilliant soldiers and uncomplicated in the face of battle.

Most of all, they were loyal.

Within her first few months, Shaak discovered that a large amount of clones spoke Mando’a, the language of the Mandalorian people, and the bounty hunter that had been their genetic template. Mandalorian culture was heavily based in family ties and community. Adoption was common, and Shaak found herself enamored with the idea of adopting each of the young men and boys that she oversaw.

So yes- she’d become attached. However the war ended, Shaak knew that her responsibility lay with the men that she’d sworn to nurture and protect. Which was why every council meeting she attended made her more and more weary. The death tolls of the clone soldiers were high- too high. Many Jedi were inexperienced in war and had inadvertently led their men to their deaths. There were exceptions to this, Masters Plo and Kenobi were legendary in their regard for the men whose lives they held, and knights like Secura and Skywalker were the same. Shaak thanked the force for Jedi like them.

Her maternal instincts began to show more and more in recent months, a few days ago a cadet had even called her mom, and she couldn’t bring herself to be disturbed by it. It was adorable.

Shaak sighed, bringing a hand up to gently trace one of her head-tails and shook the thoughts from her mind. She’d seen men shipped off to their deaths, but what Skywalker and Kenobi had warned her of was different. The death would be coming here.

The Separatists were planning an invasion of Kamino.

**Author's Note:**

> So that was a thing. This- I hope- won't be your standard cross-over. Holly has her own journey to make and I don't want to start messing with canon too early on. I'm not sure that too much of this story will come straight out of the Clone Wars, save for some *really* important beats.
> 
> Anyhow, please let me know what you think, I'd love feedback!


End file.
